Zig tried to hit the brakes, but instead slammed directly into the chest of the police officer, who barely moved at the impact. The cop was short—five foot eight—but built solid, like concrete.
“Mr. Zigarowski, yes?” the cop said, his voice deliberate and measured. “You’re looking for her, too.” It wasn’t a question.
“Excuse me?”
“I apologize for eavesdropping. I was . . . I heard your conversation,” the officer said. “Nola Brown. You know her.”
“Who the hell’re you?”
The officer smiled a broken smile that looked more like something he’d memorized than something he actually felt. “Roddy LaPointe.” He smiled wider, working hard at it. “I’m Nola’s brother.”
6
Guidry, Texas
Twenty-one years ago
This was Roddy when he was seven.
He was a boy who was good at hiding things. This knife was a perfect example. He’d stolen the switchblade with the pakkawood handle from Gary Dubursky’s older brother.
Holding it now in his open palm, Roddy liked the weight of the knife—it had heft, like it mattered—and though he couldn’t verbalize it yet, he knew that not everything in life mattered.
With his thumb, Roddy pressed the knife’s silver button. The spear blade sprang out like a Nazi salute.
“Roddy, you dumb shit, we’re not even looking for you anymore!” yelled twelve-year-old Ellen P., the one girl on the block who everyone was afraid of. “No one cares!”
“I bet he’s out of bounds,” clucked Chad, a mouthy ten-year-old.
Back before he and Nola got rescued from the group home in Arkansas, Roddy had learned the consequences of being out of bounds. Here, he wasn’t out of bounds. He was twenty feet straight up, well hidden by the leaves of the crooked red maple tree that served as home base for their game, a hasty merger of freeze tag and hide-and-seek.
Standing on a branch that curved like a hammock, he stared down at the tops of Chad’s and Ellen’s heads, watching them move around like ants. Roddy stretched his arm straight out, dangling the knife from his fingertips.
A few weeks ago, someone had lit a fire in the newspaper vending machine outside of Margie’s Luncheonette. Two weeks before that, one of the girls in Roddy’s class had come home crying, saying her knapsack smelled like pee. And last week, a neighbor had accused Roddy of using a stick to poke out her cat’s eye. Roddy swore on Jesus he didn’t do any of it.
In response, Roddy’s new foster dad, Mr. LaPointe, told him, “There’s both a Good Roddy and a Bad Roddy inside you—but you need to feed the good one. D’y’understand?”
Roddy shook his head. He didn’t understand.
“Try it like this,” added Mr. LaPointe, a devoted churchgoer. “We each have a little monster inside us.”
“A real monster?”
“Kinda real. Sorta real. Like the Bad Roddy versus the Good Roddy. You have to look inside and— Try it like this. In those moments where you want to figure out good from evil, well . . . y’know that little whisper that you hear at the back of your head? That’s your conscience—it’ll always lead you right.”
It was wise advice. Lately, though, the whisper at the back of Roddy’s head was starting to get louder.
“I bet he quit,” Ellen P. said, clearly annoyed as she took a seat at the base of the tree.
Roddy wouldn’t quit. Not when he was having fun like this, pinching the knife between his pointer finger and thumb, letting it dangle, the blade pointed straight at Ellen P.’s head.